¶ Intro / Opening
This is the InFocus podcast from The Hindu.
¶ India's Economic High Points
Hello and welcome to the Hindus in Focus podcast. I am Nivedita Varadarajan. Over the past few weeks, there has been a lot of cheer about the Indian economy. Depending upon who you ask, India has already become or is on track to become the fourth largest economy in this year, 2025. Nithi Aayog CEO B.V.R. Subramanyam even declared that we will overtake Germany and become the third largest economy in the world soon.
More recently, we got even more happy news. The World Bank said that extreme poverty in India fell to 5.3% in 2022-2023. A report by State Bank of India projected that poverty rate in India fell to 4.6% in 2024. So, all of this is extremely great news. But what does all of this mean?
We decode the numbers and the context behind the numbers with Dr. Pata Chatterjee, Dean of Economics at Shribnada University and the professor at the Department of Economics at that university. Thank you so much for joining us today, sir.
¶ Expert View on Recent Optimism
Thank you for having me here and it's a pleasure talking about the Indian economy. We've been receiving a lot of good news about the Indian economy so far. Over the past couple of weeks, we've heard that... the IMF said that it is it is that India will become one of the largest economies the fourth largest economy by the end of the year we've heard that
Poverty, extreme poverty in India has declined by leaps and bounds. What do you make of this as a general trend? As you mentioned, that Indian economy is doing quite well. economy that is booming in many ways but there are multiple challenges too so we'll talk all about it uh to begin with IMF projection that India is now the fourth largest economy is something that we were expecting, though we weren't expecting.
that to be so soon and partly it's also because the japanese economy hasn't been doing so well it's been growing at a rate less than about one percent or so whereas india has been growing at about above 6%. So I think both of these factors contributed to India crossing Japan sooner than expected. India is a large country in terms of population, in terms of economic activities. So it's something that I think is...
at par with the kind of India sizes that the Indian economy is now the fourth largest economy. And just again to give you the context of India has been growing at above 6% or so for about 20 years or so now, more than 20 years, since about 2000. actually making progress for a significant period of time, right? And that is the good thing. Where I think we are still a little, I wouldn't say... But I would say a little bit of concern that we have is that India's growth rate is.
about six percent whereas for india to become a developed economy by 2047 the goal that the prime minister has set and i'll also given the demographic changes India is undergoing. We would want the Indian economy to grow at about 8% or so. So it's still a little short of what India... should be growing at to achieve some of these goals. So we'll talk a little bit about the poverty later on. Let's focus on the growth for now.
So in terms of what's going well for India is that we had done some reforms in the 1990s and so on. It has kind of unleashed that growth process from then on. So we have been growing consistently. What I think we still need to worry about is how to push. this growth rate to that 8%. And for that, we need to think about what are the factors that we have to focus on to ensure that the growth rate will be that extra 2%, where does it come from, right? That's what we need to focus on.
¶ IMF's GDP Calculation Method
Yes, so we'll talk about the challenges in greater detail later, but first let's talk about the GDP as such. How exactly is the IMF calculating which country is the largest economy and how does it make such calculations? Right. So IMF, not only IMF, but a lot of other organizations, including the Indian government, RBI and all, do have projection models. So IMF in particular, what they have is a projection model which is specific to each country.
So they call that a bottoms-up approach with guidance from the top, where each country team creates a projection model for the country where they take in country-specific assumptions and models. But on top of that, the IMF has a layer, which is based on global assumptions. Global assumptions of the interest rates across the countries, the exchange rates, the commodity prices, and other geoeconomic and geopolitical considerations.
And then they have an iterative process by which all of these country models are reconciled and eventually they create a model for each country which is consistent across. across the globe, right? So individual country teams then calculate these projections for each country, and those projections are what we see coming up. One point... to remember here is that while the models are different, and that's where we see some differences between different projections, the underlying data is
more or less the same. IMF has no other source of data other than what's being published by the government, right? So they're taking data. from on national accounts on monetary variables on trade and so on and also demographic and population government finance balance of payment so they use all different kinds of sources of data and then put them into the model and then they do this kind of projection. So India has a specific model within the IMF WEO models.
So that's how they come into this, yeah. Okay. So when... Is it safe to say that the models are similar across countries or is there a difference between, say, a developed nation like the US versus another developed nation like Japan and a developing country? So that's the thing about IMF projects and models, that they have specific models for each countries. Of course, structurally, they are similar in many ways, but the country-specific...
aspects are different. So absolutely that a developing economy, they will factor in certain things which may not be relevant for a developed economy. country specific factors that they bring in into the model will be different and in particular across developed economy and developing economy say for japan versus india that the fact that will impact the economic performance will be different. But there will be certain global variables which will be similar.
are same and of course as i mentioned there what they do is they run different it's an iterative process so that these models are actually consistent it's very important that these models are consistent across the countries. So they have a process by which they look for consistency across countries through an iterative process.
the country specific factors can be very different between two different countries even within developing countries it can be different right for say for example for indonesia the commodity prices or you know um prices and things like that can have a very different impact than for india which is importing a lot of it whereas in indonesia might be exporting some of it so the country specific models incorporate these differences Okay.
¶ Understanding GDP as a Progress Measure
So, sir, when I was researching about this topic, there's a lot of discussion about how GDP is not the sole indicator of progress and how there are various other factors that one needs to consider. So, there was a YouTube video which I was watching and one of the... comments in that, kind of underlettered to this. But they were talking about the GDP in that and they said, so figuring out if GDP is...
okay as an indicator is like putting the head in the oven and the feet in the freezer and saying that the body temperature is perfectly normal. What's your take? How can we use a GDP as a measure of progress and is it enough? Right. Of course, I mean, this is a debate that's old one, right? And there are certain factors that
make not necessarily GDP, but GDP per capita as a good indicator. So first of all, that's one thing that we have to realize that in terms of well-being of people, if by progress we mean that whether people are doing better than previously. What we need to look at is not necessarily GDP, but GDP per capita. Even that is an imperfect measure of
progress. However, it captures the essence of well-being much better than GDP per se, because by virtue of being a large country, the GDP is large for India by definition. So GDP per capita, on the other hand, kind of gives us an idea about what amount of resources are available for each person. However, even that is
inadequate because there can be inequality. So there can be a section of people who get... a lot whereas a section of people who do not get enough but on the average the gp capita might be high right it does not also capture gdp or gdp per capita also does not capture non-market transactions and in a country like india where there is some bit of that going on which can be at home production with or you know
gardens that cater to families and things like that, and non-market transactions and barters and so on. So the well-being of people... can also increase because of these activities which may not be captured by the GDP or GDP per capita. Also, what GDP per capita does not necessarily...
capture adequately is the issues related to sustainability, right? So that's another challenge and particularly now we live in a time where we need to think about of how to ensure that the growth process that we are undergoing, and not only in India globally, leads to sustainable development rather than simply depleting resources for the future. So while GDP and GDP per capita in particular may not be adequate, they do capture the well-being to a certain extent and also the other...
things that I talked about can be correlated with it. The advantage of looking at GDP per capita is that there's one indicator that gives us a way of understanding whether we are making progress or not right rather than giving an absolute value at least we can track the nature of progress and that is the greatest benefit because
Tracking 10 different variables can be difficult for individuals as well as policy makers. Whereas looking at one particular number and seeing how it's changing gives us a greater sense of whether we are making progress or not.
¶ Comparing India's Economy Internationally
So a reason I bring this up is when the news came out that India is now the fourth largest economy and it's taken over Japan. Many people pointed out that Japan is doing so much better in comparison with India in terms of GDP.
capita and things like that. How do we look at this seeing that we have such a huge number of people here and our economies are so vastly different. How do we gauge the difference between the two countries or between India and most of the countries because the problems India
faces only china perhaps will face the same thing or face the same thing because they're much bigger than us and they're more advanced than us in terms of uh their economic progress so how do we gauge this how do we how do we put a number to it and how do we identify it right there's no denying that india is still far from being developed economy right we have a large population as you pointed out
comparable to probably only China. And within that, there is a significant portion which still do not have enough resources to leave. So I think it's pointless at this point to kind of try and compare India and Japan. can only aspire to be there in a certain number of years, maybe a couple of decades or so. But clearly we are not there. Within India, as we... talked about a little bit that the inequality is such that there can be people who have enough resources and the lifestyles are similar.
to those in Japan or Europe or US, but for a large section of the population, it's not. So our first goal and aspiration is to... ensure that the living conditions of even the least well-off person is such that they have a comfortable life. There is absolutely no hunger. There's enough nutrition. There's a place to live. an opportunity to work and live a decent life. That is the minimum goal that we have.
In that end, it's far from Japan. In terms of comparison between India and China, India and China were at a similar... levels in 70s or even early 80s and so on, right? But China has made huge progress. China had grown at a much faster rate for a longer period of time, whereas India has.
grew in India, opened up later than China. China opened up in 1978, India opened up in 1990s and it's been growing, but the growth rate has still... been slower than the peak rate of china so i think we still have some ground to make up for even compared to china and um We have the potential, we have the possibility, whether we will make it or not, that still remains unclear. So where does India stand in terms of other...
¶ Inequality and Human Development Indicators
indicators like say like you mentioned income inequality or the standard of living or for labor force participation for that matter how does it compare to developing countries and to the top five countries in the world because we are now the fourth largest yeah i mean look uh as we talked about that you know gdp or gp per capita while gdp per capita gives us a sense of uh an average
person's well-being to a certain extent, particularly the change over it, it does not capture a whole area of things. And as you mentioned, these kinds of things actually gives us a complete picture. So first of all, in terms of inequality, and that's where I think... there's a lot of concern because in india the inequality has increased significantly in recent decades and times right
Post-independence, the inequality was actually going down, right? India was an unequal society during the colonial rule. After the independence, the inequality was going down, and that continued till about the 80s or so. From 80s onwards, the inequality started increasing, but not... I mean, not significantly, but till 2000s. Post 2000s, it started increasing at a...
And right now, our inequality is very high. It's comparable to countries like other BRICS nations like Brazil or South Africa, which... are among the most unequal societies in the world. And that's where we have landed ourselves from being far more equal society. So this is something that is definitely a matter of concern. that how do we mitigate this while
we definitely need to grow at a faster rate. We need to ensure that all sections of the society benefits from the growth, right? And there's no divergence that we are noticing right now. And that's also... reflected in how we have made progress in the Human Development Index. The HDI is a composite measure which takes into account a variety of things. to come up with how an individual is doing in terms of the human well-being, right? And there we rank.
quite lowly. It's 130 out of 193 countries. So that is something that we are not... we shouldn't be very proud about. We've made progress there too, right? We have, in the last few years, we have moved from 134 to 130, but I think it's not... that fast enough as we would like. And within that, I think there are certain things that have been good life expectancy has gone up. It's now about 72 years.
So that's a good thing. But if you think about access to health and health care costs for ordinary citizens and so on, so there we still need to make a lot of progress, right? We have made certain, we have taken certain steps, including insurance for a large set of population. Simply not having enough healthcare facilities and access is a matter of concern. In terms of education also, we have ensured that...
You know, a lot more children are getting enrolled and the mean number of years of schooling has gone up. But the quality of education is still something that needs to be. improve drastically. And that shows up not only in the HDI, but also in terms of employment, labor market outcomes, and so on, right? So that's... also a bit of a challenge that how do we ensure that our education system is much better in producing a workforce and producing humans who are capable of
¶ Labor Force Participation and Demographic Dividend
decent living, right? And talking about labor market, another concern is about the labor force participation. There's a labor force participation in India. is significantly lower than most other countries, right? And that's a bit of concern because one of the great things that's going for India is this demographic. change that we're talking about right while most of the developed economy is seeing
a dwindling of their population. The fertility rate in most countries is far below the replacement rate, which is 2.1. In case of India, the fertility rate has fallen and in some states it's lower than 2.1, but overall we still have a very big young population. Right. And that's the great advantage. And that's what China has taken great advantage of in pushing their growth rate. However, in India, the labor force participation.
While it has increased a little bit over the last few years, it still remains at about 60%. China's labor force participation rate, on the other hand, is about 76%. And in particular, the concern is that the... Lego Force participation for women. remains significantly low. It's increased to about 30% or so, according to the periodic labor force survey. But there are two concerns that one is in...
It's still very low. And the second is this increase comes a lot from the kind of word that is not necessarily very highly remunerated. So those are the concerns that we have in terms of. looking at an array of indicators about how the economy is doing and where we are and what can be done.
¶ Extreme Poverty Reduction and its Meaning
So, one area of success is the number of people we pulled out of extreme poverty. Recent World Bank report said that extreme poverty in India has fallen to 5.3% of the total population. Given how big our Indian population is, that's a huge... huge achievements seeing that it was 27% a couple of decades ago. What does this actually mean and how does this translate to economic progress for the people who have been lifted out of poverty?
doing much better or they're just in the thin poverty line and they can fall back anytime? By all means, this is... a great news, right? This is definitely something that we should be happy about. But let's try and understand these numbers in terms of the poverty line, in terms of what this 5.2% means. so on, right? So the first thing that we have to understand is how the World Bank comes up with this international poverty line. So the international poverty line is...
essentially the median of all national poverty lines that's there, right? And what the World Bank has done is that now it has a new set of... price data across countries called the international comparison of prices icp data so it has a 2021 ICP data, which gives us the purchasing power parity across countries in 2021. So the earlier data was based on 2017 prices.
So the new one is based on 2021 prices. So the earlier data was the poverty line was $2.15 per person, whereas this one is $3 per person in the 2021. And this has resulted, as I said, because of this new price data that we get, the new national poverty lines that every country has defined in the meantime. And the third is also that they... a new there's a new data that's available across countries including the indian data which has a new data from the 2022 uh national consumption survey
And I'll talk a little bit about that data in a bit. But let's understand this, that this $3 means... approximately in PPP terms, because Indian PPP is about $20, so it's about 60 rupees per person, right? So we're not talking about a really big sum of money. It's a bare minimum that a person probably needs to just get through the day at 60 rupees per. That's all that we are talking about. And therefore, while this is great that we have managed to bring down this extreme poverty line, poverty.
to less than 5.3%. But we have to understand that this is really the bare minimum that we are talking about. In fact, if we look at even World Bank, the World Bank has different... poverty lines for different groups of economists, right? So for lower middle income, India is a lower middle income country. If you divide countries into different income groups, it's $4.2 per day.
And by that standard, we still have about 23.9% who are in what we can call moderate poverty. So we still have... some bit of concern for these group of people, about a quarter of our population, who remain vulnerable, who remain at a level of income. that is probably just their minimum, right? And so there is definitely genuine progress that's there, but let me also talk about a little bit about the new data because this is based on the new data that we got
¶ Nuances of the New Poverty Data
in the consumption expenditure survey in 2022-23. This was a new data that we got after 11 years. In between, there was a survey that was done which was aborted. That data was never released. So it was data that we got after a really long time, but also that this data is somewhat different from the previous surveys. And that's where we need to dig in a little more to understand that what is...
I mean, is this number comparable to the previous numbers and what is the real progress that's there? For example, you know, in this survey, so this data comes from surveys and it's... survey that is what is called multi-stage stratified and random sampling. So all of those things were done very nicely here too. But for example, there are certain changes, subtle changes that were made that can impact what we are getting out of it. So one of the strategies in terms of identifying villages.
that were made in this new survey was to constrain the number to ensure that there is at least a minimum percentage of villages which are closed to urban areas. In previous surveys, for example, that wasn't the case, right? And I haven't looked into the data, but one can make an educated guess that... the villages close to urban areas are probably richer than the ones that are further off so if we are oversampling this set of villages in this
data compared to the previous, then there is a difference that is coming up already. Also, what this survey has done is this survey has lumped roughly, you know, large, probably 80-85% of the population into one group because what they have done is they have looked into people without land in the rural areas as one group. And then they have classified, they have classified households based on landholding.
In the urban areas, they have grouped all people who do not have vehicles into one group. And then depending on the vehicle ownership, they have divided people into different groups. So as a result... this group, which is expected to be much poorer without land, without vehicle, has become much bigger in a sense, right? And so maybe it's not the number of...
people that are being surveyed at that lower end of the income could be lower in this survey than in previous surveys. So there is a little bit of... that that we have to be careful about and people who are doing research in this are looking at it and we'll probably get some research papers out and get better idea but As of now, we don't know whether this is causing any of these numbers to change, but this is something that we need to keep in mind in terms of what's going on.
¶ The Role and Nature of Subsidies
So what is the role of subsidies when it comes to lifting people out of poverty? I have a suspicion that because the government is giving a lot of money and thankfully they're doing it, they're giving lots of food grains to the people, they're able to sustain themselves and they'll be far worse off without these subsidies. not that any government in india will ever remove a subsidy and that's a good thing no look i think we have to
understand that subsidies are a whole array of things in India, right? I mean, there are subsidies for different kinds of things. you know, different segments of population get different kinds of subsidies. And in particular, I think what has helped a lot is having access to food grains.
free of cost. And by some estimates, there were 800 million people in India are eligible for that. And that is something that is... definitely useful in ensuring not only that India lifts people out of poverty, but also ensures that they get some better... because another big concern is that the nutrition in India is not adequate, right? So that is definitely something that is useful to have and has...
resulted in better, increasing well-being of people, right? So that kind of subsidy is definitely something that I think we need. as bare minimum to ensure that people don't fall back into different kinds of poverty traps and things like that. Whereas there are different other subsidies that we really need to think about whether they are giving any benefits or not.
At the end of it, the subsidy comes from the government budget and the government budget is limited. So there are different other kinds of things that the government could be doing with that same money. which can benefit the same group of people more. So that's the trade-off that's there, right? So I think while...
There are certain subsidies which are useful. There are certain subsidies which are wasteful. So to just think of subsidies as one blanket lump sum thing, I think would be wrong. We need to estimate. all of these separately and understand which of these subsidies are actually helping the targeted population.
¶ Achieving 8% Growth: Why and How
We'll talk about some of the challenges that are up ahead for our economy. You mentioned several times that one of the challenges is that we're not hitting a targeted 8 to 10 percent of GDP growth every year. There are about six. That's making us one of the fastest growing large economies in the world right now. But is that enough? You said that it's not. So what can we do?
Context of not enough is that, okay, India is undergoing through a demographic transition. That means that India right now has a large base of young population, but in... at about 25 years or so from now, that will not be the case, right? And when that happens, when we have a larger section of the population who are outside the working age, particularly at an older age, then there is a larger set of population which depends on
the working age population, right? And then growth becomes far more difficult. Whereas right now, this dependency is low, we have a large base which can be productive. and can increase economic activity and therefore the growth can be high. And that is exactly why we want this 8% growth. because this eight percent will allow us to become a big shit nation or a developed country by 2047 or so right and if you look at you know, the history of countries that have transitioned from being
poor to rich. It's a small set of countries, right? The first wave was Western Europe and the colonies, particularly US, Australia, New Zealand, and so on and so forth. And that followed from the Industrial Revolution, and they took a really long period of time, we don't know what centuries, to achieve that. Then came the Asian countries, starting with Japan and the Asian, four Asian tigers, which were the small economies like Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan.
they made the transition much more recently. And all of these, whether Western Europe or... uh these asian economies and so they managed to do this transition before this demographic transition happened right right now for example in south korea it's really a big challenge that the population growth rate is probably negative right so so so we as a country in india we need to get to that level before
we start facing those problems. That's where the 8% comes from. But by itself, the 6% growth rate is... quite a commendable one right and uh particularly as you mentioned if we look at cross-country comparison so so the question about how to move this growth rate to 6% to 8%. We need to look at a variety of factors that we can come across. One,
¶ Labor Market Dynamism and Job Creation
We talked about a little bit the labor force participation, the labor market in particular, right? So that is something that we need to look at much more closely. What is going on? Why are people not working? So we, in one of my own research, what we have done, we calculated the... probability of getting a job and probability of losing the job and these transitions that can happen between not having a job to having a job and so on, right? And what we find is
that in the case of India, the probability of getting a job is not as high compared to developed economies. And the probability of losing a job is... Also not very low, but reasonable. So in India, we do not have the dynamism in the job market, right? So there isn't enough scope. of people to move up so if people are without a job they're kind of stuck there having not having a job whereas who are pro having who have a job are probably
reasonably safe, but the probability of losing a job is high enough so that there's a risk that they may transition to that. So we need to think about how can we make the labor market much more dynamic. and in that we need to think about labor market reforms but here's the catch right labor market reform we've been talking a lot about how to ensure firing is easy how to make these kind of changes so that the
The employers have much more control on the workforce, but this will not work unless we produce a large number of jobs, right? So while... generating a lot more flexibility in the labor market is important, but that might just make people much more vulnerable and can actually induce people to not work even more.
Because then this becomes a far more risky endeavor. There's a cost of... investing in yourself to make yourself ready for a job search for a job and so on and so forth right and people might just get disillusioned and disinterested if We do not produce enough jobs. So I think that's one of the key challenges now we have is, are we producing enough jobs? And here we have to be, you know...
¶ Manufacturing, Skills, and Education Challenges
really digging deep in understanding how can we generate jobs. In fact, we have been debating that can we build manufacturing, right? Is that...
the answer to this. And there are two different views on that that India has been... an outlier of sorts in the way that we have transitioned from agriculture to services much faster than other countries and examples that I talked about, countries which have transitioned from being poor to rich, have all gone through a different process where manufacturing played a critical role right whether you think about us or western europe or closer to home south korea or
Even China, manufacturing has played a critical role. But in India, that hasn't happened. So that's where all this... question about how can we increase our manufacturing capacity. While we definitely have to do that we also have to understand the nature of manufacturing has changed quite a bit. it's not necessarily absorbing that kind of labor force that it was earlier, the technological changes that has come through the...
kind of things that's being produced has changed. I was reading just yesterday about a steel plant that... sale has called East Coast State. And my father used to work for that. So that's why I was very keenly reading that article. And Steel Authority of India is investing a huge sum of money to build.
a modern new plant there which is one of the oldest steel plants in the country but what i also noticed is there projected number of people that will be directly employed is quite low compared to what steel plants used to employ. 30, 40, 50 years back. So even steel plants have been using different other kinds of technologies so that the need for labor force is decreased. So we need to figure out.
what kind of manufacturing. Also, we need to understand that one critical gap that's there in terms of thinking about generating jobs and thinking about expanding manufacturing and pushing the growth is the skill mismatch that we have, right? We, as we talked about earlier, have now ensured that a large section of our population has some bit of school education. That's probably not enough to build the kind of skills that's needed for today's manufacturing. Right. So, for example, I was.
A few years back, I was talking to someone who was into auto parts manufacturing. And that person was mentioning that, say, we need someone who's killed in... fusing plastic to metal. That's one of the things that apparently is a big deal in cars, right? Because there are plastic parts, there are metal parts, and how do you fuse these two? It's not...
as if you need a nuclear scientist for that, right? But you need someone who has basic understanding of how to use modern machinery to do these kind of things, right? understand complex instructions right even for example to understand okay what is the protocol to be followed in case of emergency or things like that so that is the capability that we have
not been able to produce through our school system, our college systems. And that is something that we need to work on. But how can we improve a basic... education, because without that, you just cannot build skills, because India, and particularly over the last few budgets, have invested a lot in skilling. very attractive from a political process point of view because killing is much more short term.
ties in with the election cycles and so on, whereas building a basic education capability is a much more long-term thing, so may not have that bit of resonance in the electoral market. So that's probably why it's a little bit neglected. But without having a basic good education, we... just cannot build that bit of skilling. So that's another thing that we have to worry about and the challenges that we need to solve to ensure. that India becomes a developed economy by 2047.
The list is long in terms of challenges, and we could go on and talk about a few more. But there are also, as I said, some things that are going on well. is that we have ensured people are enrolling. We have ensured that the life expectancy has gone up. We have ensured people have access to piped water. Sanitation has improved. So there have been some... progress overall. And I think we can build on those things to ensure that India becomes a developed economy and people get a decent living.
¶ The Challenge of Sustainable Growth
across all segments. Okay, so I just have one final question to you. If there's one major challenge that can come in the future, what can it be and how can we solve that? Well, as I said, I mean, the number of challenges. You can talk about it a lot, yeah. Yeah, number of challenges is long. expected right because india is still far from being developed and we need to overcome these challenges to become developed right and that's the whole point of it
And I listed some of the things that we need to look at in the immediate future. But I think one issue that... India cannot ignore is this issue about sustainable growth. And that is something that while we have to ensure that we use all means to grow. That means that, for example, when we're talking about energy in particular, we do not have the luxury to say we cannot use code, right? We have...
access to coal. We have coal mines and we have to ensure that we use coal. But even within that, how can we ensure that we have a growth process that is sustainable and does not deplete. our future resources completely. So we have to be much more responsible to our future generations. So that is a big challenge that we have, that we have to grow fast. So that means we have to use all engines that's there, irrespective of the kind of externality it produces.
But at the same time, can we think about balancing things a little bit? And in fact, there can be opportunity in that, right? Because we can make a leapfrog in terms of using technology. We can become. are global innovators in using technology to mitigate some of our challenges today in terms of climate change, in terms of sustainability, pollution. We both are in the Delhi NCR.
area so we experience that every year well not not only every year practically every day right so so those are some of the things that we really need to worry about now rather than wait and say that, okay, once India becomes developed, we can worry about those because that might be too late. So I think that is one aspect I would like to.
bring out that maybe we're not talking enough about this when we are talking about how India can become a developed economy. India needs to become a developed economy, but also in a sustainable way. Okay. Thank you so much, sir, for taking your time off and coming on this interview. Well, it was a pleasure talking to you, Nuvetam. Thank you for having me. InFocus will be back soon.
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